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Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Review: Proof

When I was in elementary school, my grandfather had a house
in Kentucky coal country. We went to visit him for a family trip once, and he
woke me in the middle of the night to watch a coal train roll past, not a
hundred yards from the back porch. When I read “Passage” in Karina Borowicz’s
latest poetry collection, Proof, I
felt as though I had been catapulted back to that night:

[…] the
crushing machinery

of distance
rolls close

and is gone
with urgency

an echo
trapped

in the
stripped branches […].

And this is not a new sensation for me. Borowicz’s work has
the distinction of being able to transport me--and, I suspect, other
readers--not only through my own life and experiences, but through hers, as
well.

This is, I suspect, thanks to her effortless way of
channeling American poets of the past. Whether it’s echoes of Whitman in the
way she touches on many different subjects (history, literature, astronomy,
biology), dialogues with Emily Dickinson’s ghost in “Emily’s Dress,” or riffs
on Robert Frost in “Saw,” Borowicz gracefully reaches back into our shared
poetic archives. Yet she remains her own poet, driven by something unseen: “The
invisible is calling,” she writes in “The Invisible,” and this invisible thing
is, no doubt, her literary genius.

Like Whitman before her, Borowicz is not afraid to reach
into her own archives for inspiration. In this case, she shares with the reader
a few more of her “bee” poems, hearkening back to her prize-winning collection,
The Bees Are Waiting. At the same
time, she is in no way averse to moving forward, as the bird in the casually
sinister lines “Each day, the woodpecker’s tapping / comes closer” from
“Hunger.” Borowicz even admits she has a certain animal-like nature in
“Paintbrush,” writing, “[…] I can’t help it my paintbrush / has claws and its
fur keeps growing.” It is this primal feeling that pulses beneath her words.

We see this best when the contrast between Borowicz’s more
controlled work and her breathless, stream-of-consciousness technique is played
up. The side-by-side poems “Frozen Boot” and “Proof” display this well: in
“Frozen Boot,” no punctuation trips readers up as we follow the speaker’s
progress past a statue, while the measured lines of “Proof” give us a
deliberately punctuated list of items left behind by a dead neighbor.

Near the end of Proof,
Borowicz writes, “Have I told myself this story before?” Perhaps she has, and
all the better for the reader: by the time we are lucky enough to read her
lines, she has sharpened them to a gleaming point. As a result, when we
encounter the declaration that St. Thérèse is “filled with rage,” we too want
God to “show [us] how to make it holy.” Borowicz acts as the conduit here,
giving us a glimpse into her world which is abundant with the holiness of
well-wrought poetry.